Susan Wolf, “Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility”, in Ferdinand Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology, Cambridge University Press, pp. 46–62 (chapter 3) — DOI-10.1017/CBO9780511625411.003. The date is discussed in the history note; it is the same first printing that other readings call 1987.
Key takeaways
Registered from second-hand sources, not a reading of the essay. Each point says who reports it. Nothing below is quoted from the essay except its opening paragraph, which Cambridge’s chapter page shows as an extract.
- The question. The opening paragraph, as Cambridge shows it: in everyday contexts “lawyers, judges, parents, and others” assume they know the conditions of responsibility and ask only whether a person is “mature enough, or informed enough, or sane enough to be responsible”, or was “acting under posthypnotic suggestion or under the influence of a mind-impairing drug”. The essay asks whether that assumption survives the metaphysics.
- Deep-self views and JoJo. Holton’s lecture handout for MIT 24.211 (Free Will XIII, posted on his course page) reports that Wolf’s exemplars of the deep-self (“Real Self”) view are Frankfurt, Watson and Taylor. JoJo, son of a vicious dictator, inherits his father’s power, desires and values and identifies with them, and Wolf argues he is not free, because his upbringing makes him unable to perceive what is just and true. Freedom requires that the agent be able to act in accordance with the demands of reason.
- The sanity condition. By the same report, what the deep-self view lacks is captured by sanity, a normative competence. Dryden’s IEP entry (LIT-297, NOTE-266, §2.b) classes Wolf’s normative-competence condition as a strong substantive account of autonomy, against the content-neutral hierarchical accounts. Buss and Westlund (LIT-296, NOTE-267, n. 4) list Wolf with Fischer and Ravizza among reasons-responsive views and give her phrase “the True and the Good”.
- Wolf’s own worries. Holton reports that the essay closes on two of them: the view assumes a certain moral objectivity, and it seems to collapse rationality too easily into truth.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as Wolf’s critique of deep-self views and her statement of the sanity condition. It is moral philosophy with no instruction for machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it.
Unavailable because no lawful copy could be read (see the status note).
This entry gathers what lawful sources report and does not reconstruct the
essay from them.
Why no relation is declared. The owner asked for rivals or
corrects where the text supports it, and by every report this essay
opposes the deep-self views directly: it grants that identification is
needed and denies that it is enough. That is a rivalry of accounts of
responsibility in the sense of ADR-022. But the essay is reported to
target Frankfurt’s 1971 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”,
Watson’s 1975 “Free Agency” and Taylor’s 1976 “Responsibility for Self”,
and the record holds none of them. Its Frankfurt holdings are the 1987
essay “Identification and Wholeheartedness” in this same volume
(LIT-575), unread, and the 2004 Tanner Lectures (LIT-293), on love
and caring rather than responsibility. I could not check whether this essay
discusses either, so declaring rivals on reputation would be a relation
nobody verified. A reader of this essay should declare rivals
LIT-575 if the essay’s objection reaches Frankfurt’s wholeheartedness,
which JoJo, who is wholehearted, suggests it does; and it is the natural
relation for Frankfurt 1971 or Watson 1975 if either is ever filed.
How it bears on the record’s theories.
- THEORY-029 holds that no higher-order attitude makes a motive one’s own by its order alone. Wolf’s objection is a different one: grant that JoJo’s motives are his own, wholeheartedly, and he is still not responsible. The regress asks what makes an attitude the agent’s; JoJo asks whether being the agent’s is enough. An account could answer the regress and still fail JoJo.
- THEORY-040 holds that a structural condition is met by a manipulated agent. JoJo is not manipulated in the hypnotist’s sense, but his values were installed by his upbringing, and Wolf is reported to locate the defect not in that history but in a present incapacity, the inability to see right from wrong. That is a structural condition with an external anchor, which is why McKenna and Coates (LIT-291, §4.3) place the Reason View at Frankfurt’s crossroads too: a manipulator who leaves normative competence intact produces an agent Wolf must count responsible.
- THEORY-054 places autonomy in integration, content-neutrally. JoJo, fully integrated, is the case on which the two diverge, though THEORY-054 is about autonomy and Wolf about responsibility, so they are not yet rivals.
Its neighbours. Wolf’s “Asymmetrical Freedom” (LIT-688) is the earlier statement of the Reason View, and Freedom Within Reason (LIT-685) develops both; its second chapter is the Real Self View. The same Schoeman volume holds Fischer’s “Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility” (pp. 81–106), the reasons-responsiveness account usually set beside this one. It is not filed: it too is paywalled with no open copy.
Priority for a reading: high. It is 17 pages, the source of the JoJo case, and the record’s only path to a first-hand statement of a substantive condition on responsibility.
Access when seeded:
- Crossref record (pp. 46–62, ISBNs 9780521327206, 9780521339513, 9780511625411; 29 January 1988).
- Cambridge Core chapter page: the opening paragraph as a summary, the rest behind purchase or institutional access; “Print publication year: 1988”.
- Unpaywall: no open-access location.
- Richard Holton, “24.211 Metaphysics; Free Will XIII”, a one-page lecture handout on his MIT course page (https://web.mit.edu/holton/www/courses/freewill/lecture13.pdf), read in full. It is about the essay and the book, not a copy of either.